Oddball Is A Drum Machine Controller You Toss Around To Make Beats | Top Stories

Making beats with various drum machines and sequencers can be a fairly sterile affair. Typically, you hit some buttons on a rectangular box or click grid squares in a software interface, looping the pattern again and again until you’ve created a beat you’re happy with. A new Kickstarter project, however, changes the game completely with Oddball, the beat-making ball that you can bounce, hit and toss to create beats kinesthetically.

Oddball is both a bouncy ball with pressure sensitive sensors inside and a mobile app. You use the app to connect to the Oddball and assign different drum-like sounds to it, then bounce. You can build up beats as you change the sound of the Oddball, looping them all together while you record into the app. You can monitor the beat you’re making with headphones, external speakers or even just your phone. The bouncing beat-makers can even connect to each other to make complex, multi-sound beats all at once.

At press time, Oddball has already garnered $43,610 — quite a bit over the original $39,607 Kickstarter goal — so you can assume this thing will get made. You can pledge $65 to the project to get your own Oddball when they ship in January of next year, a 40 percent discount off the eventual retail price of $112 for an Oddball, charging cable and free app download.